


small love

by tin_girl



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: M/M, also look at me yet again writing about sex without mentioning genitalia how smooth not, but probably the quietest shizaya i've ever written?, goodnight thank you, i was kidding with the izaya/ikebukuro tag, i'm sleep deprived please don't hate me, it's actually a love triangle you know, or was i, this should be longer but i'm trying out this less-is-more thing, which doesn't change the fact that this is still overwritten and dramatic and purple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:48:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22548808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: The first time Izaya sees Shizuo after coming back, he’s still limping and already drunk on the city, whispers spreading on the streets like a cough, he’s back, have you heard, people betting on him like he’s a racehorse, people betting against him, people glancing over their shoulder and rubbing the napes of their necks because they could swear they felt somebody’s gaze heavy on their back, even though Izaya only has one pair of eyes. He’s got his chess pieces on dozens of different boards, and when he cups his hands over his face at the end of each day, his skin smells like everything that could happen, everything that already has, everything that hasn’t yet.
Relationships: Heiwajima Shizuo/Orihara Izaya, Orihara Izaya/Ikebukuro
Comments: 20
Kudos: 72





	small love

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.  
  
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

(…)

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

~Charles Baudelaire, Crowds

You could descend like rain, destroy like fire if you chose to. If you chose to.

~Sandra Cisneros, Loose Woman

Once, Izaya picked up a map of Tokyo, and tried to unfold it, but it spilled all over, too big for his boy-knees, more blanket than something to read. He spread it on the ground anyway, and lay down on top of it, moving his arms up and down, up and down, an angel shape even though he was anything but. Then he tore the map to shreds and he put the scrap with Ikebukuro printed on it on his tongue like communion wafer, waiting for it to melt. He wouldn’t swallow until it went soft in his mouth, and once it did, he pretended it tasted like sewers and car waste, like sushi and sake, like sweat and blood, and not like old ink. His throat clenched around it like a promise, like a fist, and Izaya smiled up at the ceiling, pretended it wasn’t there, thought, _you’re mine_ , and the city must have heard him because when he had it in his palm years later, it seemed resigned to it, an _alright, then_ of a sort.

He tamed it like something wild, and now it was up to him to feed it, up to him to groom it, up to him to get rid of its fleas, and how ironic that Shizuo should call Izaya that, when in fact—

As he almost dies, he half-expects the streets to fold around him like protective fingers, and when they don’t, leaving him exposed and at the sky’s mercy, he smiles, because when one forgets they’re the betrayed one, betrayal can be quite the treat. Get out of Ikebukuro, Shizuo says, has been saying, keeps on saying, and what a shame that Izaya’s battered so and can’t take a deep breath – no last drag of the city’s odour into his lungs, no bliss of that old-brew tea, of crime, of rats.

Izaya doesn’t look over his shoulder, because he’ll be back, he will.

*

The thing about dying is that Izaya thinks it would be quite a ride, if one could do it over and over again, like trying different carousels in an amusement park. And so, when Shizuo’s about to kill him, the only reason why he’s not giddy about it is because it’s too soon, because if he dies now, it’ll be forever.

They’re seventeen, and Shizuo’s fingers are long enough that they cover almost the entirety of Izaya’s exposed throat, more and more pressure as he threatens to squeeze, and Izaya thinks of how spectacular it always is when something refuses to budge and then yields at last. If nothing else, he’ll be one hell of a crime scene, if nothing else his blood will seep down for the city to drink and will stain the underside of Shizuo’s fingernails. Izaya imagines the monster scrubbing at it until he’d start bleeding himself, and how it would be a cursed cycle, how the red would never go away. _Out, damn'd spot!_ , something deliciously Shakespearian about it, and Izaya thinks, _kill me, then. Kill me, so you have to live with it forever._

Shizuo digs the fingers of his free hand into Izaya’s side, sinking them into the ridges between his ribs, and Izaya arches against the pain but before he can decide if he likes it or hates it, the pressure is eased, gone, the points of contact only echoes.

‘Hell, do you even eat?’ Shizuo says, voice almost-but-not-quite shaky, and his hand is still wrapped around Izaya’s throat but Izaya can see it in his eyes, how something has changed, how now he can’t decide if he should beat Izaya up or feed him soup.

‘I don’t want your pity,’ Izaya manages to croak out, his throat all glued around the sounds, Shizuo’s skin spring-warm.

‘I don’t pity you,’ the monster says, eyes all earnest. ‘You deserve every bad thing, and worse.’

‘What’s this all about then?’ Izaya snorts, glancing at Shizuo’s hand, loose at his side, gone from his ribs, as if by inflicting pain, he’s burnt himself, as if Izaya’s a hot stove.

‘I don’t know,’ Shizuo says, and keep his left hand on Izaya’s throat, as if testing himself. ‘I don’t know.’

*

Every week, Izaya spends hours in cafés, sitting alone at some corner table and listening in on conversations.

Funny how boring people are, funny how not boring at all. He always orders coffee, never drinks it, and he talks to no one, even as he listens to everyone talk. He grows a few inches over the years, but he doesn’t grow up, because he has no need for that. Lost Boys don’t age, and being lost means that everything is unexpected.

Izaya thinks that he’d rather have bad unexpected than good expected, and what’s good anyway? Sometimes, on one rooftop or another, he will spread his arms, and they will seem to go wide enough to embrace the city and to embrace its sunset-blush. He will inhale, and smell cigarettes, even though there will be no monsters in sight.

There’s no happiness, but there’s glee, and Izaya laughs more than some.

*

His first time, the man is all gentle hands, as if Izaya is unfinished clay, still wet, something the edges of which have to be smoothed over. The man is careful with his fingernails, only touches with his fingertips, and it’s as if he’s trying to shove Izaya’s protruding bones back into what little soft he has, but no luck, Izaya’s bones must be laughing at such gentleness and care.

It’s as if the man is in love, and Izaya laughs so loud that someone bangs on the wall from the adjoining room, and they didn’t bang before, there was no reason for them to.

‘I’m not butter, you know?’ he whispers into the crisp, white pillowcase, and he wonders if it’s supposed to be like confession, someone trying to pluck all his bad out, all caressing hands and a suggestion of a prayer to say later, the assumption that Izaya wants to be made better or put back together just because he came and kneeled, even though he’s in love with being in pieces.

When someone tries the chisel approach, it doesn’t work either. All nails, all teeth, all slaps, all crudeness, all vulgarity, and Izaya just lies there and stares at the small fruit fly that keeps bumping into the bulb lighting the seedy room a morning-piss yellow. He just lies there, and laughs, and he could be anyone, because he’s not really there, he’s not really himself, he’s somewhere else, reading about what’s happening to him, and he can dog-ear the page any moment he wants, in fact, he will dog-ear it in a second, and get up to boil water for tea, and it won’t matter at all.

The next morning, there are bruises, but when he presses on them, there’s nothing to remember, no Proust to it, it’s just a bit of smashed capillaries, a purpling inconvenience that a sleeve will cover and a mind will forget.

Izaya forgets things only when he chooses to forget them.

When Shizuo finally touches him – properly touches him – it’s weeks after the hand-on-throat incident, a night dark like the inside of some pocket, far-off city lights for old crumbs. Izaya is home, which is to say on a lonely swing set in a deserted park, because home is not a house with two twin girls waiting to hear the Kachi-Kachi Yama tale yet again, home is Ikebukuro, home is everywhere, home is nowhere, there’s no use for a word like that, anyway, _home_ , and how precious that his humans would think of it anyway.

He's not sure how Shizuo finds him there – maybe by scent, since that’s how beasts work. It makes Izaya think about sharks able to smell a drop of blood from miles and miles away, and he wonders if it’s hunger that keeps Shizuo coming back, or something else.

‘Funny how quiet it gets here, isn’t it?’ Izaya says conversationally, once Shizuo doesn’t kill him, once he lights a cigarette and leans on the swing set, for all intents and purposes lost in thought even though brutes like him don’t think. ‘Like some rotten bit of a beehive.’

Shizuo seems jittery, but not angry, horrifyingly awake and yet with bruised eyes, as if he hasn’t slept in days. When Izaya comments on it, he says, unusually quiet, _because I haven’t_. Izaya knows that Shizuo wants something from him, all impatience, all urgency, but too exhausted for resolve, and so he salutes and jumps off the swing, smiles that one smile that has people follow, and Shizuo, some human left in him, does.

‘Breaking and entering?’ he says a while later as Izaya toys with an apartment lock, and he sounds too monotone for that voice of his that always makes Izaya think of taking chainsaw to pine logs, all smell of wood shavings and a risk of losing a limb that one could get high on.

‘It’s for sale,’ Izaya says, the lock clicking open. ‘Think of it as an unscheduled viewing.’

When they enter, neither of them turns the light on, but even with nothing but faint billboard glow from the outside to illuminate the apartment, it looks extravagant, too much space and some weird compromise between cold modernity and Western baroque, arches and curvings but plenty of sharp corners, too, like an accident waiting to happen. Shizuo whistles, and Izaya taps on a chest of drawers with his knuckles.

‘Mahogany,’ he says, and then puts his hands on his hips and looks around. ‘And it’s all furbished, too.’

In the bedroom, Izaya reaches towards the small desk lamp, and Shizuo circles his wrist with his fingers, the pressure nowhere near painful but something decided about it, a sure grip even though his fingers shake like moth wings.

‘A light in an apartment that’s supposed to be empty?’ he hisses, and Izaya wonders at what his pulse is doing, picking up under Shizuo’s touch, quick, quick, quicker.

‘Live a little,’ he says, and flicks the switch. In the circle of amber light, their hands together look like they don’t hate each other, and Izaya wonders if it’d be any fun, pretending that they never have.

‘We even get to test the bed, huh? Lucky day,’ Izaya says, like shoving someone undecided into a train about to take off, and he’d consider feeling nasty about it, only it’s Shizuo that has bought the ticket in the first place, all pleading eyes, all save me, even if it would be a rescue by drowning. He should know better than to come to Izaya for help, anyway, even if no one else would do.

‘I don’t—’ Shizuo starts, and stares at the desk lamp, as if he can blame it all on it. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says, eyes back on Izaya, and Izaya’s good at guessing, but he can’t quite guess if it’s existential or literal.

‘They even have some reading, look,’ Izaya sing-songs, reaching for one of the books carefully arranged on the desk. ‘Kafka? How— cliché. I mean, they could have at least considered—’

He stops mid-sentence, Shizuo’s breathing short the few feet away. Izaya smiles at him as sweet as he can, and Shizuo scratches at his own forearm like he hates himself. Izaya can only think of a total of two things that would bring on the self-loathing, and since Shizuo hasn’t beat anyone to a pulp in the last hour, it must be the other thing. When he crosses the space between them and puts his hands on Izaya, he might hate himself for wanting it, but the sigh he breathes is all relief, anyway, as if this strange touch makes it all right.

Later, Shizuo is all fumbling hands, all too long limbs, and it’s almost charming, this clumsiness, honest like someone accidently dropping their hand of cards, spilled for all the players to see, so honest that Izaya won’t look, doesn’t see.

‘How unexpected,’ he says into Shizuo’s shoulder, even though he’s been expecting it for weeks, the ghost of Shizuo’s fingers heavy on his throat like a necklace, and how his fingers would wander, wanting to grab for a wrist that wasn’t there. Shizuo says his name, and Izaya learns what it sounds like when it’s not meant to be an insult or a threat. He quite likes it, and asks Shizuo to say it again, putting his fingertips to Shizuo’s throat to feel for the vibration. Speech, he thinks, is an animal.

Izaya expects it to be like that first time, all efforts to smooth his edges, or like that second time, more beating than sex, but Shizuo touches him almost matter-of-factly, and it’s just that, touch, the way it should be, like using a kitchen knife to butter bread instead of trying to pry something open with it, instead of putting it to people’s throats. Shizuo’s hands push at him and there doesn’t seem to be any intent to rearrange behind it, just curiosity, as if he’s blind and needs to touch something to see it, just this old as time longing for warmth, and Izaya, who’s usually an arctic sea, is plenty warm.

Izaya sees nothing but the inside of his eyelids, and he almost regrets doing this – he knows that nothing will ever feel good after, not quite.

Later, Shizuo falls asleep on top of him, and it seems less circumstance and less accident than strangely deliberate, like he’s a shield against everything bad, and Izaya wonders if it’s him Shizuo’s shielding, or the world and against him. Shizuo’s breath is wet on his collarbone, and Izaya remembers how in old ballads and tales, you can never wake the beast. All protective, limbs a tangle and an arm slung across Izaya, and Izaya doesn’t need it, doesn’t want it, doesn’t want to want it, and so he considers stabbing Shizuo and shoving him off himself. He would get up changed, and life is all about change, but in the end he just slips out from under Shizuo, gets dressed and leaves, letting this one thing stay as it is.

*

The first time Izaya sees Shizuo after coming back, he’s still limping and already drunk on the city, whispers spreading on the streets like a cough, _he’s back, have you heard_ , people betting on him like he’s a racehorse, people betting against him, people glancing over their shoulder and rubbing the napes of their necks because they could swear they felt somebody’s gaze heavy on their back, even though Izaya only has one pair of eyes. He’s got his chess pieces on dozens of different boards, and when he cups his hands over his face at the end of each day, his skin smells like everything that could happen, everything that already has, everything that hasn’t yet.

Shizuo looks like a car crash, and he’s always been good at that – looking like the end of the world in motion even when still.

‘I’ve won,’ he says, frowning, and doesn’t seem to notice that the cigarette stub he’s holding is burning his fingers. ‘It’s my city now.’

‘How about you let me try and win it back from you?’ Izaya says, and remembers how he broke a window once, and what the skin of his arm looked like – cut open and stretched around a shard of glass – remembers and shapes his smile after it. ‘A game of cards, maybe—’

‘You weren’t supposed to come back,’ Shizuo says, as if he hasn’t been waiting, as if he hasn’t been staring at clocks and forgetting to count the days so it would seem they passed faster. Izaya can smell it on him, all the way across the street, even though there’s no wind.

‘Yet here I am,’ Izaya says, spreading his arms, making an offering of himself, and he thinks of how when you press your hand to the mirror, your reflection does the same on the other side of the glass. How when Shizuo touched him that night in a strange apartment for sale that wouldn’t sell, it seemed like with every press of his hand, a ghost palm would press on the same spot, cupping the underside of Izaya’s skin. How Shizuo seemed to have gotten inside him somehow and was everywhere, in, out, a rip in the map of the world that one’s finger keeps worrying at, keeps coming back to.

‘Like a curse,’ Shizuo whispers, shaking his head, and Izaya remembers how when he was killing him, it felt like the hits were coming from inside him, too.

*

There should be two words for the city, Izaya thinks as he drinks expensive wine that he stole just for the fun of it, like house/home. After all, when he says ‘city,’ he doesn’t mean a chessboard but a game of chess, both board and pieces, all changes.

*

Izaya doesn’t need the city’s loyalty, doesn’t need fidelity. All he wants is its love, all he wants is for it to go pliant under the touch of his hand like a cat relaxing into sleep in your lap, like a beast breathing wetness into your collarbone in yellow light.

He finds the city’s pulse and presses, listening to its blood, drinking it, spitting it out and wiping his mouth after, spilling it, spilling it, spilling it.

*

Izaya forgets things when he chooses to forget them, and so he forgets stealing one of Shizuo’s bartender shirts, forgets how it smells of sweat and nicotine and skin, forgets shoving it in his closet and forgets taking it out every now and then to put it over his nose and inhale.

*

It seems strange, this distance of streets between them, this stillness, and Izaya chooses to forget what Shizuo’s skin used to feel like, alive, so alive, like it must have had thoughts of its own, only the memory sticks around like a stubborn insect and won’t be batted away.

It’s scarier than when his bones broke, this quiet aftermath of intimacy. It makes him think of nuclear disaster and how quiet the world can go after, flakes of ash in the air, not snow at all, don’t let it fool you.

Once, Izaya sneaked out and up onto a rooftop, where Shizuo found him an hour later, a cup of steaming coffee in hand and a blanket in the other. No free hands for a pack of cigarettes left, and Izaya was so touched that he almost couldn’t bear it, almost threw himself off the ledge, anything to crush this awful feeling to bits.

‘I’m tired,’ Shizuo said, wrapping the blanket around Izaya’s shoulders, tight like a chrysalis, as if to immobilize him, as if to say, _stay, enough damage already_. There was a long gash on his forearm from when Izaya caught him unaware and sliced the skin with a knife, and gangs were fighting each other, hospitals were filling up, gossip was spreading like a plague. ‘Let’s roll a die, what do you say? If it’s an even number, you’ll cut that shit,’ he continued, making a broad gesture with his hand, as if ‘that shit’ was all of Ikebukuro, and not just what Izaya’s done to it so far.

Izaya kissed him, long and dry, and memorized the peeling skin of Shizuo’s lips for later. After, he would bite his own lips sometimes, so that when he’d trace his tongue over them, they wouldn’t feel his at all.

Later, after Shizuo said, _that’s it, then_ , Izaya did roll a die, and he chose to forget everything he felt when it settled on three.

*

It’s not about seeing someone without clothes on, this intimacy thing. It’s about letting someone touch you and letting them see what it’s doing to you, that it’s doing anything at all, that you’re not above it, that you’re just like everybody else, an admission that you have thoughts, and feelings, and desires, an admission that you have eyelashes, and knuckles, and elbows, an admission that you are not that businessman you passed on the street, not that woman reapplying her make-up in a half-empty bar, not anyone, not everyone, just you.

Izaya never hated anything as much, not before and not after, and he tried to wash off the stink of this person he’d turn into that would steal Shizuo’s cigarettes and leech off his warmth, this person that wanted simple things like jasmine tea, and central heating, and a man with lips chewed to minced meat.

‘You’re the one who keeps insisting you’re human,’ Shizuo would say. ‘Act it.’

Izaya would walk the streets, and every plot and ploy would feel like courtship until the city melted under the heel of his shoe. He knew, hands in his pockets and the smell of coming snow in the air, that nothing else would ever feel like this, that nothing else could.

*

He’s been back for months, and not even Ikebukuro will protect him from Shizuo, only Shizuo himself will, by staying away. Loyalty, fidelity, and all that, when all Izaya wanted was this small, pathetic love.

*

‘Fine,’ Shizuo says once, on his back, shirt unbuttoned. ‘Do whatever you want.’

It’s graduation day, and Izaya’s trying not to think two, three, ten moves ahead. Shizuo closes his eyes, and lets Izaya touch him, his muscles strained for a moment until, slowly, he yields like the city has. All Izaya’s ever wanted, just like that, only now he has it, what should he do with it? What should he do?

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe that this features only the two of them and no one else. It's like I'm not even pretending that I care about anything but this ship huh
> 
> Thank you for reading <333 Any and all feedback will be greatly appreciated :))
> 
> Oh, and if it sounds like something you'd be interested in reading, here's a link to my original story about idiots and art theft: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917


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